Archive for Paramount

WINGS IN THE DARK — “Terrible title!” pronounced Fiona — is a piece of junk from Cary Grant’s Paramount years, before he found himself, but it has Myrna Loy, and she’s in no doubt as to her location, apart from at the film’s climax when she’s lost in the fog in her plane — yes, she’s an aviatrix, still a hot topic at the time. Which means she gets to wear darling outfits. Grant, an inventor and fellow aviator blinded by a gas explosion, has to fly up and rescue her in his science plane.

It’s a piece of junk but it’s hugely satisfying. Grant strains too hard, and has Hobart Kavanaugh as “Mac,” a Scottish sidekick, with the worst accent on record: he doesn’t actually say “The engines canna take much more of this,” but seems constantly on the verge of it. Loy’s face is in constant, adorable motion, puckering up in little self-critical moues, if “moues” is the word I want. Do that in a 1930s Buck Rogers collar and you take the cake for cuteness.

Fiona noted that Myrna finds time to apply lipstick — and remove it — between shots on her epic Moscow-to-New York record-beating flight. The natural look is for realism, to help Myrna look tired when she’s been flying for forty-eight hours. The lipstick appears as soon as she establishes radio contact with Cary Grant. He has that effect on a lot of people.

The film is lightly feminist: Loy bankrolls Grant’s pseudo-radar invention with her own sky-writing and barnstorming career, and even when he rescues her at the end, she turns around and rescues HIM right back. Six different people wrote this soap opera nonsense, James Flood directed it. A lot of Paramount’s lesser works aren’t as compelling — having bailed on the shapeless WEDDING PRESENT (1936, Grant again, this time with Joan Bennett), we found we had to finish this one, and were both glad and a little ashamed we did.

It’s very nice that THE UNINVITED has a commercial release (there was a VHS for sale in the US, which I bought, but this is its first appearance since) — it’s a rather lovely 1940s ghost story, perfectly blending the coziness and chills we demand from that genre.

Struggling composer Ray Milland and his sister Ruth Hussey (and their little dog, too) fall in love with a deserted clifftop residence on the Cornish coast (whose landscape in no way resembles that of Southern California, as Austin Powers once helpfully noted). Soon, ghostly sounds and apparitions are detected, and a tragic backstory connects the hauntings to young Gail Russell, with whom Ray becomes smitten.

Dodie Smith, of 101 Dalmations fame, co-scripted with Frank Partos, and there’s consequently some good business for Bobby the terrier (named after Greyfriar’s Bobby, no doubt). The film benefits from sleek Paramount production values, including regular Billy Wilder collaborator Doane Harrison’s nimble cutting (quick-shuffled reaction shots build anticipation for each spectral manifestation) — the generation of suspense mainly comes from this, the moody lighting of Charles Lang, and the performances, which find varied and often witty ways to suggest terror, which is then hopefully picked up and mirrored by the viewer.

My, Gail Russell was a lovely girl. Even if she seems to share a dialogue coach with Jennifer Jones’ CLUNY BROWN — she has intermittent bursts of strangulated poshness, and the rest of the time just plays it American — she’s a delight. I think her wide, shiny eyes had as much to do with Stella by Starlight becoming the film’s hit song, as the Victor Young melody itself. The two together are a lovely combo.

THE UNSEEN still lacks a home vid release. It shares with THE UNINVITED the talented journeyman director Lewis Allen, frightened girl Gail Russell, editor Harrison, and the syllable “UN”. But, despite Raymond Chandler co-scripting, it’s not quite as successful. Essentially a GASLIGHT-type thriller, it does gain in uncanny-ness via the prominent role given to children (cute Nona Griffith and Richard Lyon, son of Bebe Daniels). When they describe a man without a face who lives in an empty house, there’s a delicious supernatural/surreal undertone, sadly dissipated by the rest of the narrative.

Chandler ensures that the bit players all make their mark, and everybody in the film is interesting, but I don’t think audiences then or now would be greatly surprised by the climactic revelations. However, an official release or TCM rediscovery would be nice, so we could properly appreciate the great John Seitz’s cinematography.

“In THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP (1932), Paramount Pictures place Charles Laughton in charge of a submarine. It sinks.”

I tweeted this, and the Self-Styled Siren said she was a bad Laughton fan for laughing. Not at all! To admire Laughton’s craft and peerless imagination is not the same as to believe that the kind of character he plays would excel in a position of command. Look at Captain Bligh. In the role of “the Commander” in this movie, he’s been set up to fail, for the first half establishes him as a lunatic in the throes of psychotic jealousy, trashing Cary Grant’s career on the mere suspicion that he’s overly fond of Mrs Commander (Talullah Bankhead). So Mr Grant is out of the picture, and Gary Cooper comes into it, which is even worse news for marital harmony, as you might expect.

All of this plays out in Paramount North Africa, before we decamp to the sub, making the movie a sort of MOROCCO/HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER mash-up. In Part One we get a beautiful lunar oasis tryst, whirling dervishes and tenacious salesmen. In Part Two we get a collision, bursting bulkheads, flooding compartments, and Laughton’s descent into final madness even as his sub descends to the ocean floor, as fatally compromised as his marriage.

Bankhead plays the virtuous wife driven into adultery by hubbie’s paranoia with dignity and just enough melodrama. Grant is still in awkward, stiff-necked mode. Coop pouts and purses his lips a lot. His performances come in two varieties: those with a mute running commentary from the writhing lips, and those without. Both are good, but I tend to prefer the more stationary lip approach. Anyway, Laughton is the whole show.

Faced with a cardboard lunatic to play, the Great Man breaths seething life into him through bold decisions — this jealous nut actually wants to be proved right, to catch his wife in flagrante, and when he does so he goes from tense to relaxed. Laughton wheels out his cherubic smirk. The terrible doubt is over (because if Mrs Commander is innocent, then that “brain specialist” was RIGHT) and now he can proceed to DESTROY THE WORLD. Actually, he can’t, because he doesn’t have a Doomsday Device to hand, but he can certainly crash his sub into an oncoming ship and send her to the bottom of the sea with all hands and feet.

It’s been suggested that suicides often cheer up once they’ve actually made the decision to do it — once that choice is made, there’s nothing more to worry about. Laughton either knew this or, quite probably, intuited it, so that his character becomes positively triumphant as he steers his men towards doom, and only sinks into a despond when any reasonable argument threatens the logic of his annihilation. In one such scene, the distressed Commander pulls on his face, gradually squishing his cheeks up and drawing them downwards until the whole fleshy construction resembles a wad of dough suspended from his eyelids. Don’t tell me Charles didn’t practice this in front of the mirror. For hours.

Marion Gering directs with zest, although his attempts at dramatic flourishes are mostly rendered redundant by Laughton’s stylistic exuberance — you really don’t need a giant ECU of the twitching eyes, not when you have a player as expressive as CL.